


Paddy Wagon

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1930s, Angst, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-11 11:40:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7890379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah loves them both, her boys. But there's a crackdown on boys just like them, under La Guardia's ever-stricter regimes, and if she had to choose - if she <em>had</em> to, only one of them would survive in jail longer than a night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paddy Wagon

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to blame foxfireflamequeen for this, right off the bat. She prompted something where Sarah Rogers loves Bucky, sure, but Steve is her son, and if it came down to it - if it really came down to it - she would throw Bucky under the bus to save Steve. So she does.
> 
> The book choices are from a quick google search of "pre-WWII queer literature," Riker's is a prison in the city, and La Guardia was one of NYC's more famous mayors known for his morality campaigns.

It was September, but August heat lingered in the air, stagnant puddles from yesterday’s rain and the stench of garbage mingling with diesel smoke in the close air of the motor bus.

Sarah coughed, and almost wished she were back at the hospital, where it reeked of ammonia and vomit, but at least in summer they could open the windows for the sea air. [But apartments were cheaper, in the Heights](http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/213805.html), and even with three incomes — well, most of Jamie’s money went to his family, most of Steve’s went to the doctors, and so it was still down to Sarah to pay the rent.

It wasn’t a bad place to live, though.  Jamie had started work on the docks, with his Da, but Sarah had watched the lad do Steven’s homework for years, sliced up apples for the boys to eat, sprawled across her son’s sick bed and Jamie trying to explain geometry while Stevie doodled triangles and prisms across his friend’s neat equations.

[Sarah had moved Jamie](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6252457) in that year, because George Barnes had an eye on his son’s broadening shoulders and his own lengthy bar tab, and putting a child like that on the docks would be a waste, though she’d gotten in several loud fights with the boy about it, and twisted his ear right off the docks and back into the high school when she found out he was missing school. 

Jamie did the books, now, at the Yard, graduated the year before at the top of his class. He helped out at some of the smaller businesses, too; he had sweet talked hulking Mr. Birch into hiring on Steve at his [tattoo parlor,](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2384984/Stunning-vintage-photographs-early-C20th-tattoo-artists.html) designing anchors for soldiers’ thick arms and sketching pin up girls for their pockets.

Steve was dreaming of art school, over the bridge in Manhattan, talked like he was going to paint the Mona Lisa and move them all into one of those buildings with an elevator and a car waiting for them on the street.

The car would be nice, Sarah thought, her ankles aching and her toes pressed into the front of her shoes as she walked the last few blocks home, feet sweaty and stockings too tight. The boys would have left something on the stove for her, she knew, but it was full dark on a Saturday and they would both be long gone, the sweltering heat and promise of freedom sparking through their veins, Jamie languid with it and Steven flushed and ready for a night out or a fight.

Electric street lamps spilled yellow light over the black of the paddy wagon as Sarah walked by, over another police raid on [The Masquerade](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7890649/), the third this month since another article on [sex morons](http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2005/The-Gay-30S/) had made the front page of the _Post_. Personally, Sarah thought that Eddie — who lived across the fire escape from them, and made the most delicious chicken soup Sarah had ever eaten, passed it through the window to Jamie whenever Stevie took sick — was the least likely person to commit any sort of crime, but he tended bar at The Masquerade and went by Leonora at night, and that was all the police wanted to know.

The reformers were breathing down La Guardia’s neck, Sarah knew, pushing for castration of sex criminals, demanding more raids and harsher penalties for lewdness and sodomy, actual time in Riker’s instead of a quick brawl and the cops’ mild demand that everybody “put on some pants.”

“Hey, Ma,” said a familiar voice, an uneven breath that Sarah had nursed at her chest and fretted over for nearly twenty years. She spun around, facing the open doors of the paddy wagon, the steps where Steven was sitting with a wet handkerchief pressed to his swollen nose. He grinned at her, teeth bloody, and waved.

Eddie — [Leonora](http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/263636) — looked supremely uninterested in the whole affair, slouched on the metal seat in the police van in a silk skirt and little else, tiara askew and reading a dog-eared copy of _Nightwood_. Eddie’s uncle ran the union; he spent a lot of time waiting for someone to remember that, during processing, and then to toss him a spare set of men’s clothes and send him home.

“Bucky brought home a watermelon,” Steve told her, his voice muffled by the handkerchief or the broken nose. “It’s too hot for anything else, but we put out the rest of liver I made yesterday,” he said, as though he weren’t sitting on the back of a paddy wagon, hauled out of a queer bar and waiting for the police to take him to jail. To Riker’s, as a _sex criminal_.

“Is this pain in my ass your son, ma’am?” a grizzled policeman snapped, coming around from the front of the van and glowering down at Steve, who was only nineteen and still didn’t need to shave.

“You want a pain in your ass, _Mister_ Officer?” someone else in the wagon drawled, fluttering their long eyelashes and nearly catching Steve in the head as they stretched out one long, bare leg.

The cop rolled his eyes, apparently well accustomed to acting as chauffeur for the patrons of The Masquerade. “And if I did, Danny,” he replied, not bothering to glance into the wagon to see whose leg it was, “What good would you do, huh? I’ve seen what you’ve got in those lace drawers — and there ain’t much of it to see.”

Steve snorted, groaned in pain when it caught in his nose, and then laughed. “Ma,” he said, still grinning, “this is Officer Bujalski. He says –”

“Hey, Mrs. Rogers,” interrupted a soft voice from her left. Jamie’s hair gleamed under the street light, knocked out of place and flopping forward into his eyes. One eye was swelling shut, and blood was smeared across his chin from a cut on his lip, the collar twisted on his shirt and the top button gone, his hands cuffed behind him and a young policeman shoving him forward to the van.

The world felt too sharp, all bright edges and angles, Sarah’s ribs shrinking and everything tilting dangerously. There wasn’t enough air to breathe. It had no doubt been Steven, who thought they could walk into a queer bar that had been raided twice in the last month — Steven, who tried to brawl with the police and broke his nose and probably Jamie’s cheekbone. Steven, who they would take away to drafty Riker’s Island, where he’d catch cold and die, long before the reformers marched on the prison, ready to cut through his brain and cut off his testicles.

“I know this boy,” she told the policeman, gesturing at Jamie without looking at him, her throat tight. “He works the docks, at night,” she lied, folded both hands around her purse to keep them from shaking. “He takes after his father.” Sarah kept her eyes on Officer Bujalski, but she could feel Jamie flinch back, could see Steve’s mouth fall open out of the corner of her eye. “George Barnes — just out of prison last month, but he’ll no doubt be back.”

“Ma!” Steve sounded hoarse, shocked onto his feet. “You’ve got it all wrong, you don’t –”

“He’s a charming fairy, when he wants to be,” she continued, talking over her son. “He must have lured my son here –” Officer Bujalski lifted his thick eyebrows, looking surprised, but didn’t say a word. “- under false pretenses. My son doesn’t even know what these sorts of places are.”

Leonora snorted. Steve’s face had flushed a deep, splotchy red, the handkerchief strangled in one fist.

Jamie had stumbled backward, putting the policemen between them, breathing like he was the one with asthma and weak lungs.

“But, ma’am,” the younger policeman started, blinking at Sarah with a confused frown, unconcerned that his most recent arrest was using him as a shield. “That’s not –”

“Why don’t you take your son home, ma’am,” Officer Bujalski interrupted, shaking his head at the younger man. “Gorman, go padlock the doors, then meet me in the truck.”

“Come on, Steven,” Sarah said firmly, but Steven wouldn’t look at her, his hands balled up into fists, the pulse jumping in his cheek the way it did when he was spoiling for a fight.

“Go home, son,” Officer Bujalski advised, patting Sarah’s boy on one thin shoulder, steering Jamie around him and toward the truck. Sarah could figure out how to get Jamie out tomorrow — a few nights in lock up wouldn’t give Jamie a fever. A year at Riker’s wasn’t even so bad, as long as there were no more reforms.

Leonora hiked up his skirt, pulled a cheap copy of _Tender is the Night_ out of his rolled down stockings and tossed it to Jamie when Officer Bujalski took off his handcuffs. “Here, kid,” he said. “There ain’t much else to do in jail.”

“Just go home, Steve,” Jamie breathed, when Steven wouldn’t move out of the way. Steve tilted his head up and Jamie tilted his down, the tips of their noses nearly brushing. “Mam will let me bunk at home, now that Becky’s married and gone.  After all, I’m the one paying the rent.”

“You’re _nothing_ like your Da,” Steven hissed, glaring in Sarah’s direction, and she had no doubt that if she hadn’t been Steve’s mother, he would have spit. Then he looked right at her, for just a moment, before wrapping his arms around Jamie’s neck and hauling the taller boy into a kiss, nevermind that Jamie was flailing his arms and trying to pull away.

“ _There_ ,” Steve declared, pulling away seconds later with a wet pop, lips damp. He scowled at Sarah’s shoes, then turned triumphantly to the forbearing Officer Bujalski. “That was indecent, wasn’t it? Now you have to take me in.”

“You’re not a sex moron,” Jamie muttered, the blush still red on his cheeks, face pressed to Steve’s hair. “You’re a certifiable _idiot_ , and it’ll serve you right when they cut off your balls.”

“Just get in the van,” Bujalski huffed, waving them both into the paddy wagon. “I’m putting you in with Danny for the night. It’s what you deserve, scaring your poor mother like this.”

He slammed the wagon’s doors closed, Jamie and Steve still visible through the grating.  “Don’t worry, ma’am,” the policeman said, pulling his hat off and scratching his head, staring at the sidewalk near Sarah’s feet.  “No one’s going to prison.  The boys’ll be out tomorrow, and I’ll send your son on home with Leonora, here.”

_Tomorrow?_ Sarah frowned, wondering why the police seemed so nonchalant about how much worse things were now, for queers. She looked up at the wagon, to see her son’s slender fingers wrapped through the doors, his fiery blue eyes locked on hers. 

“We saw a couple of thugs heading to the bar with baseball bats,” he said, the anger washing out of his face, the fingers of his free hand laced with Jamie’s behind the bars. Steve had misheard Father O’Malley, once, kicked the priest hard before realizing his mistake, and Sarah had ached to see his face go ashen with regret over something that he couldn’t mend. “So we went in after them, to keep ‘em from ruining Eddie’s bar.”

“Or my pretty face!” Danny chimed in, leaning forward and winking as the wagon chugged to life.

“The cops came because they heard about the brawl,” Steve told her, and for the first time Sarah noticed the other car, two heavyset men cuffed in the backseat. “It wasn’t a raid.”

Sarah’s mouth felt like hospital cotton had been wadded down her throat. She looked at Jamie, who was holding his book loosely in his left hand, staring at her with his one good eye.

Jamie put a hand on Steve’s waist to steady him — because Sarah’s son didn’t have the sense to sit down — when the van jerked into first gear. “'Sokay, Mrs. Rogers,” he said, quieter than the rumble of the engine. "I would've done the same thing." It was doubtlessly true, but Jamie stayed behind Steve the way he’d stumbled back behind the policeman, and George Barnes’s specter would stand between them even if everyone else stepped away.

“I’d’ve socked you, if you had,” Steve growled, spinning to glare at Jamie and tipping over into his lap when the van moved. “Like anyone would believe you’re a more charming fairy than me, jerk,” he added, brushing his fingers lightly over Jamie’s bruised cheek, glancing at his mother only briefly as they pulled onto the road, leaving Sarah with the engine smoke and the fumes from smashed whiskey bottles, glass shards glinting under the harsh glow of the street lamp, the debris from things shattered in the fight.


End file.
